Chamber and committees

I just want to follow up John Mason’s questions about engagement with trade unions. It sounds as if that engagement has been good and has had the desired outcome, but has there been any engagement with those who specialise in representing marginalised groups or those who are disproportionately likely to be on the receiving end of inappropriate behaviours? Given how we have ended up in this situation, I am thinking of groups such Scottish Women’s Aid or, in a different context, the Equality Network or Enable. Has there been any engagement with such organisations, which specialise in representing, in particular, groups with characteristics that are protected under the Equality Act 2010?

I will start with a point of clarification on the process for potential updates to the ministerial code off the back of the procedure. The progress report that you submitted to the committee mentions that, from March, James Hamilton and Elish Angiolini will be asked to consider potential changes to the code. The paper notes that the timescale for that will very much be dependent on their availability. Does the Government have an indicative or preferred timescale within which it would expect to receive a response from both the independent advisers?

I will start off on a different topic, although the one that I turn to next might touch on some of the issues that have just been raised.

I have a couple of questions on ventilation. I am interested in hearing the perspective of Douglas Hutchison, and perhaps of Simon Cameron, if this comes within his purview. Are you clear about how you can access the £5 million of additional funding for ventilation improvements that the Scottish Government announced last week?

That is grand. Thank you. I believe that colleagues want to ask further questions on ventilation, so I will move to my other area of questioning.

I want to get a sense of how local authorities and schools are quantifying the social and developmental impact of the disruption on young people not just of the omicron wave but since the beginning of the pandemic. To some extent, we can quantify the impact on educational attainment through the testing regime, national qualifications, exam results and so on. Trying to quantify the wider social and developmental impact is much harder.

I presume that, at the individual classroom level, teachers are able to identify what additional challenges their young people are facing as a result of the pandemic. I hope that teachers are able to direct them towards and ensure that they can access school counsellors or educational psychologists. However, there is an implication for schools and local authorities’ workforce planning if you are to have a clear idea of what the level of demand will be for the additional pastoral support services that you will be providing over the coming period.

Some national survey work has been done on the impact of mental health—for example, by YouthLink Scotland and Young Scot. What work are local authorities undertaking to quantify the additional social need that will have to be met through schools?

I would like clarification on the distribution aspect. It is not the case, then, that local authorities must come to you, or go directly to the Scottish Government, with a worked-up bid before they are able to access the money. Are you aiming to provide certainty that a minimum amount of money will be available to each local authority, and will you then work with authorities to develop a case for exactly how the money is deployed? That way, the money will be distributed quickly and councils will not have to prepare a bid and wait for a response before they know whether to proceed with it.

That is really useful. I have one brief follow-up question. I accept what you are saying about how the obsession with gathering data often results in taking folk away from delivering the service that they need to and about it being schools that will resolve the issues. However, for a school to have the right skilled professionals to resolve the issues and support young people with the challenges that they are facing, there is a wider workforce planning issue for local authorities and Government, surely. For example, we need to know whether there will be a significant increase in demand at national level for educational psychologists or speech and language therapists. There are long-term workforce implications.

We knew a couple of years ago that we were short of educational psychologists, so the bursary was brought back to get more folk going to university to study for that profession. However, we do not know whether the demand in early primary, for example, will now be for speech and language therapists instead. If so, do we have folk who are qualified to go into that workforce to meet the increased demand? Is there not a wider workforce planning issue? That cannot be resolved at the level of individual schools because they can resolve the issue only if there are skilled professionals and there is money to hire them.

That is a useful clarification of the purpose of those additional three columns. I have one other technical question about the fifth stream of funding, which is teacher pay. I will use Aberdeen City Council as an example, because it is first on the spreadsheet that I can see. We are told that £200,000 is allocated for teacher pay as part of Aberdeen City Council’s allocation of the overall £145 million. What exactly does teacher pay mean there? I presume that the overwhelming majority of the money in the other four columns will be spent on teacher pay. A small amount will go towards the admin payroll and so on, but the £145 million will overwhelmingly be spent on paying additional teachers, so what is the purpose of the specific allocation for teacher pay within that?

It is on the point about filtration. In the first instance, I make the point that, at least on the basis of the Educational Institute of Scotland members survey, which was completed and published recently, there is no need to put two HEPA filters in every single classroom in Scotland. There are thousands of classrooms for which the data shows us, and teachers are telling us, the air flow is sufficient and ventilation is fine.

That said, that is far from the situation in every classroom, which is why the money is being provided. I have a couple of questions about how the money is being deployed. Given that this is a budget scrutiny session, can the cabinet secretary clarify one point? Is the aim to deploy all the money in the current financial year, within the next six weeks, or does the Government reckon that it will spill into the next financial year, from 1 April?

With regard to the distribution model, is the aim to come up with a formula for dividing the money between the 32 local authorities, or will it be distributed on the basis of authorities making a bid for what they believe is necessary in their area, including how much it would cost and the difference that it would make? Is it a pot from which they can draw down, rather than £5 million being distributed between 32 different bodies all at once?

You mentioned a letter that was sent to unions in your name and that of Councillor Stephen McCabe. It was forwarded to me this morning by a union that I have been working with on this issue. The union welcomed the opportunity to give those examples because, as I understand it, there is a disconnect between the anecdotal evidence that we are all hearing and the specific issues being dealt with in a way that can resolve them.

As well as being sent to unions, will the offer in that letter be made openly to individual teachers and to teachers who are organising through groups other than their unions? I am aware that a lot of the issues around ventilation have been spearheaded by a grass-roots group of teachers who were featured on BBC and STV news in the past couple of days. I am sure that that group would be keen to contribute, although most of its members are union reps and, I am sure, will contribute through that avenue. Are we maximising the number of ways in which teachers and other school staff are able to flag up specific issues that, for whatever reason, are not being resolved at a school or local authority level?